Author: Graham Dove

For 10 weeks during summer 2021 SONYC was very excited to be joined by three promising undergraduate students Matahari Kinanti Herwin, Almazhan Kapan, and James Venditto, who were participating in the NYU Tandon Summer Undergraduate Research Program (UGSRP). Their work explored the links between SONYC’s focus on noise pollution and the closely related issue of air quality.

• Almazhan Kapan researched data visulazation techniques and interface development, her work can be explored in detail here
• James Venditto researched air quality sensors and developed a codebase for data collection and integration with SONYC, his work can be explored in detail here
• Matahari Kinanti Herwin researched design metaphors for air quality interfaces, a prototype of her work can be explored in detail here

We were really pleased to take part in the program, and are really proud of the contribution that three such promising undergraduate students could make.

The paper “Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Data Augmentation for Environmental Sound Classification,” has won the 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society (SPS) Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award. The article, by Justin Salamon, who at the time it was published was a senior research scientist at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL) at NYU Steinhardt, and Juan Pablo Bello, the director of both CUSP and MARL, appeared in the March 2017 issue of the journal. It was honored for its “exceptional merit and broad interest on a subject related to the Society’s technical scope.” (To be eligible for consideration, an article must have appeared in Signal Processing Letters within a five-year window.)

Continue reading “SONYC Reseachers win 2020 IEEE SPS Letters Best Paper Award.”

SONYC researchers’ collaboration with members of the NYU Center for the Study of Asian American Health (CSAAH), on the AARP sponsored project SHUSH, culminated in an online community noise forum with more than 30 residents and community representatives from Manhattan’s Chinatown district, December 12th. SONYC researcher Graham Dove presented data gathered over 9 months from 3 sensors deployed on the roof terrace at Chung Pak LDC senior housing, while CSAAH researchers Yi-Ling Tan and Jennifer Wong presented findings on the health and social impacts of noise on community members. Other project SHUSH activities have included guided sound walks, and the creation of sound maps capturing some of the distinctive sounds of Chinatown.

Sounds of Chinatown website

NYU Tandon Center for K12 STEM Education has announced a new 1 year, $25,000 grant from ConEdison to help support our SONYC summer school program for middle school students. The program, in which students interact directly with members of the SONYC research engineering team to explore the underlying science associated with sound, will return for its third iteration in summer 2021. Recruitment for the program is due to start in the new year.

SONYC Summer School
Center for K12 Stem Education
ConEdison

SONYC has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Transfer To Practice (TTP) supplement of $400,000 to translate the lessons learned so far in our research into a domestic noise sensor that will help residents suffering from ongoing noise problems. We are partnering with product development agency Loft LLC, and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to design and build a new version of our noise monitoring sensor that will be suitable for domestic deployments.

Continue reading “SONYC awarded NSF TTP supplement to work on a domestic noise sensor”

Researchers Charlie Mydlarz and Graham Dove presented the latest SONYC work to representatives of City agencies and other civic organizations at Town+Gown, a city-wide university-community partnership program fostering collaboration between practitioners and academics that aims to create actionable knowledge in the built environment.

Continue reading “SONYC present to NYC at Town+Gown”

This summer middle-school students who took part in NYU Tandon’s #STEMnow program got a chance to work right alongside SONYC researchers to use sensors, microcontrollers, circuits and other real-world tools to gain an understanding of the problem. Over the course of the multi-week initiative, they sampled sounds, studied sound waves in an urban environment, built devices that make and monitor sound, and evaluated how noise pollution ultimately affects human well-being.

Continue reading “The sounds of a successful summer”

Two new pieces inspired by urban sound data collected by SONYC will be premiered at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, NY this summer. 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Natacha Diels presents Sad Music for Lonely People, on Friday July 19th at 8pm, while 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Ursula Scherrer & composer Michael Schumacher present Exotica on Saturday 20th July at 8pm. Both shown in conjunction with Michael Morley: Music for The Never Quartet.
Continue reading “SONYC Data Inspire New Performance Works at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn”

SONYC research has recently been featured in a number of high profile media venues, including The New Yorker, The Verge, Gizmodo, and on NPR’s Here and Now show. More details and a full listing of SONYC research media coverage can be found on our In the press page.

• The New Yorker
• NPR ‘Here and Now’
• The Verge

A new contributed article presenting an overview of the SONYC project appears in the February 2019 edition of the Communications of the ACM. The article, together with a video in which SONYC’s Juan P. Bello and Charlie Mydlarz discuss the project and our progress to date, are featured online.

SONYC: A System for Monitoring, Analyzing, and Mitigating Urban Noise Pollution:

• Communications of the ACM Article
• Video